In the subterranean depths of the Art Gallery of NSW’s Tank gallery, in images projected onto a wall, octogenarian artist Louise Bourgeois peels a tangerine. It is not a snack, but a demonstration of a formative and damaging childhood experience; she starts by sketching the outline of a female figure on the skin with a thick black marker, before cutting out the lines with a knife and loosening the fruit.
The mandarin routine was a party trick that Bourgeois’ father performed as a child during Sunday dinners, often in front of guests; “I’m making a portrait of my daughter,” he announced. The navel would be left until the end, for a reveal with a twist: not a girl after all but a boy, complete with a spicy penis. “Well, I’m sorry my daughter doesn’t display such beauty,” he would say.
The young Bourgeois was left mortified; she doesn’t remember if the adults were laughing at her, but it felt like they were. “And the pain was very bad.”
The documentary clip is part of the late French-American artist’s gallery’s massive summer exhibition, which spans two levels and nearly 130 works. As Bourgeois tells the story, her sculptor’s hands move confidently over the fruit, holding court as only a master storyteller can. I’m fixated. By the end, the artist can barely hold back the tears; she has regressed into a little girl, wounded and humiliated by her father’s casual, sexualized cruelty.
The episode reveals Bourgeois’ practice, personality and psychology. And it exposes the vulnerable core of a titan of art better known for her prickly public persona and terrifying, Lovecraftian spider sculptures. That this fragment is buried in the core of the exhibition is striking: we must wade through beauty, mud and analysis to reach enlightenment. Further along the wall is Bourgeois’ revenge fantasy tableau The Destruction of the Father: a red-lit alcove (an opening, a womb, a furnace or a cave?) in which pale, bulging shapes gather around a table (or is it a bed? ) littered with chunks of meat. Nearby, a spider the size of an army tank – a loving representation of her mother – watches.
Justin Paton, AGNSW’s chief curator of international art, says he feels like “the Tank has been waiting for Louise, or Louise has been waiting for the Tank”. It feels like a match made in Heaven (or as the artist would probably say: Hell), not least because of Bourgeois’ preoccupation with cellars, wells, darkness and the abyss.
Opening on Saturday, this is the first solo exhibition organized by AGNSW’s new gallery, nicknamed “Sydney Modern” but still unnamed. Paton structured the show around the dichotomy of day and night, drawing on a line from Bourgeois’ gnomic print series What Is the Shape of This Problem?: “Has the day invaded the night or has the night invaded the day?” (This is also the gloriously uncatchy title of the exhibition).
Upstairs, through a series of white-cube spaces, viewers tour the artist’s life and work, from her groundbreaking 1940s sculpture series Characters to two of her iconic cage-like Cell installations and textile works created in the 1990s and 2000s in honor of her work. to her mother’s work as a seamstress and carpet repairer.
Hands, spirals, breasts, knives and spools of thread abound. There are dreamy paintings of abstracted body parts in fleshy pink watercolors and blood red; Sex, motherhood and bloodshed are everywhere.
Then, as you descend the spiral staircase to the Tank, you are confronted with a host of powerful forms – nightmarish, playful, erotic, tender – without text or explanation: the strange fruits of the Bourgeois psyche.
At the center of the room’s matrix of seven-foot-tall concrete columns, a headless golden figure hangs back as if performing a somersault underwater. It’s an impressive moment for many, but there are also much quieter touches: a lurking cat with five legs; a spider crawling halfway up a wall; and small gouache works on paper from the beautiful, bloody series The Feeding (mothers feel it in their nipples).
Paton recommends moving from day to night, but there is a strong argument for the opposite: plumb the damp, subliminal depths first, before retreating into the lucid realm of personal history and psychological interpretation – which inevitably opens up the mystery of the undermines Bourgeois’ works of art and endangers the viewer’s chances. for a primal, instinctive response.
Bourgeois’ art was rooted in her childhood, especially the deep emotional wounds left by her relationship with her parents. She felt abandoned by her mother, who died in 1932 when Louise was only twenty; she felt betrayed by her father, a prolific flirter.
Art, which she discovered in her mid-twenties after a degree in philosophy and an abandoned study of mathematics, was a means of coping with this trauma and her changing relationship with it (she later had success with psychoanalysis, which influenced her art). While she reconciled with her mother (who is famously commemorated in the colossal spider statue Maman, now installed on the forecourt of the 19th-century Art Gallery building), she never forgave her father.
Bourgeois also seemed to struggle with self-forgiveness. She cast herself as a ‘runaway girl’: as a young woman she had abandoned her family in France, which was then on the brink of war, to move to New York with her then new husband, the American art historian Robert Goldwater. to move.
They adopted one boy and had two more in quick succession, and Bourgeois’s early artwork occupied a chaotic domestic space, in which cooking and housekeeping took a back seat. (After her husband’s death in 1973, Bourgeois ripped out the stove, cut the dining room table in half to make a desk and turned the entire house into her studio, writing on the walls). She did not identify as a feminist, but was appreciated by many artists, one of whom petitioned the MoMA in New York in 1973 to give Bourgeois her first solo show – a milestone that came frustratingly late in her career, in 1982 , arrived.
These days it feels like Bourgeois is everywhere. In Australia this year alone, her work has been shown at the National Gallery of Victoria, and in upcoming group exhibitions at the National Gallery of Australia and the Australian Center for Contemporary Art. And no wonder: raw, rigorous and courageous, her art grapples with nothing less than the human condition.
Bourgeois, who passed away in 2010, has taken her rightful place as a giant among artists of any era.